Hot damn, what a ride. By far my longest-lived mortal. The only other char I can remember not deleting was Maclochlan, who con-died. Lots of fun, lots of frustration, lots of very soft swearing so as not to wake the baby late at night.

Hunsobo was originally built to sorta levelsit at level 30 and retrieve for Draktel. As Twist (and some as Droba) I watched Draktel constantly battle ridiculously bad odds night in and night out. I wanted to help him have a chance, since he just kept on truckin'. My thought was a fire giant at level 30 could probably get two noremove swords, kill the red dragon, and have a nifty damroll to smack down outer guards.

Well, Draktel promoted me pretty quick for just the above, but he also ordered me to keep leveling because there were open Elite spots. So that sorta shot down that idea. But I thought well, I can still just levelsit at 40 to help retrieve, right?

Well, got to level 40 and didn't like the thought of levelsitting. We had no War Master, and I had a favorable shot of getting it. Two others (Qileor and Kargthak) were also gunning for it. Qileor got it, but by that time I was level 46 and decided it was Hero or Bust.

The rest is sorta history. I have almost every moment of Hunsobo's hero life logged, as well as a good deal of pre-hero stuff. I will admit to shamelessly starting a log board here for selfish reasons - I want to post these logs. :)

I'll also admit that I'm thinking "ABOUT DAMN TIME" on the agedeath thing. The past couple weeks (yes, even before I lost some of my gear) I've been wishing agedeath would come faster. I could have gone the cheap way and worn some +age gear, but I wanted to truly age death a char. I've actually had some of this pre-written for a long time.

On Courage: I know some folks think I didn't take enough risks or what have you. I think some of that perception may have merit, but some may be skewed for various reasons:
I made a bargain with Daevryn shortly after a Hell trip. I gave him a very valuable (in gold) Hell item in exchange for "sometin' from yous." I let him decide what it would be. I was hoping for one of the Empire edges (there's a couple that help you with all the various needs for gold you have as an Imperial). He gave me a different Edge that was both a blessing and a curse (though more of a blessing, IMHO): "Feign Strength." Basically this Edge made me look way better off if you were fighting me than I was. Got me to gushing? I was probably convulsing. Bleeding wounds? Writhing or gushing. And so on. This Edge was great in that it added to the aura that Hunsobo had (so I tried to keep it uber, uber secret, which often lead to out-of-group healers not healing me enough) :P.

Unfortunately, it also made me look like a big coward at times, I'd say. Wording out of fights where "both of us" were at 50%...except I wasn't at 50%, I was at 15%...that sort of thing.

Now that's not to say I didn't play it safe. I did, plenty. But I'd also try to mix it up a lot, too...so nobody knew what to expect. It seemed to work out in the end.

On Emperor-dom. I think we Imms need to come up with something more for the Emperor to do than "go gather all of your items." Current Imperials saw a note from me about a week ago about "Project Makesmash" but yeah...age-deathing an emperor probably shouldn't consist of 200 nights straight of login, retrieve, get other cabal items, try to find someone to kill, logoff.

On ganging: Hunsobo the char had a bit of reservation against ganging, mainly from his "upbringing" by Draktel. But in the same sense, the world was largely enemies or Imperials (Tribs and Imperial-friendly uncaballeds aside) and by god if you were an enemy he wanted to kill you. Me the player? Meh. I don't like ganging. And contrary to what someone recently said to me, it wasn't "all about the kill." Hopefully Armonk will attest to this, as a recent char that I walked past on several occasions instead of bashing. Yes, if I'd never killed you and had no reliable way of making you stick around to fight or something like that, I'd shamelessly gang you. Most of the time, though, it was either gang v. gang or one v. one.

On bashing: If it works, use it. Sorry if you didn't like getting bashed into the ground, but bash alone doesn't win the fight (Xenillia (sp?) can attest to that. Damn you Waserax.) However bash is great at making sure nobody does something that might make me lose the fight and/or get away. So yeah, if I could bash you, I did.

On roleplay: I feel like I did a pretty good job playing this role. It's definitely an archetypal role (big dumb giant warrior) but I tried to put a spin on it with the malaprops and sexual innuendo (those poor slavegirls) that made Hunsobo WAYY more fun to play than Gurgthock (who was also fun, but in different ways). My only wish is that I'd have managed to be more consistent with speech - I look back at some logs from 6-7 months ago and I'm saying stuff I'd never say now. I did stuff like calling Balator by its right name and then calling it "Balatorment" or "Balatorials". I could justify that with reasoning like "I did that to throw people off" or something but the bottom line is I tried to throw stuff in like that whenever I could, but sometimes forgot. At least I almost ALWAYS managed to call Outlanders "'fugees."

On the uberset: When I think about that set and realize I'll probably never have any char that is that well-geared, it makes me sad. But I used it really well, IMHO, and had a lot of fun. The funny thing is the set was about half-gathered and half-pked-for. Before Hunsobo I honestly didn't know where the strange bracers (for instance) came from. I half-remembered where Humansunder was/is, but it took Draktel leading me there (pre-War Master I think) on a miserably failed attempt to get it for HIM to show me for real. The gauntlets? Heard about them from Athellnon (Or Restinan? I forget.) Cloak? Heard about it from Thos. I learned a TON with this char. Even some wand locations (and places to check with future chars for sleeks..."why is there a chest in this room that's always empty?"

Goodbyes will follow - when you play a char for nearly 900 hours, you rack up a lot of goodbyes. It'll take me a while, and I'm going to forget a ton of people. I apologize in advance. Bring your name up and I'll respond if I do forget ya. I tried to make an ongoing list of people who *strongly* affected ol' Hunsobo's life - so while you'll see a Kholav, a char from several months ago that helped me get my first Humansunder, you probably won't see a Paskat, who didn't interact a ton with Hunsobo (but enough to get an "honorable mention" in this post). :P

Lastly, thanks to everyone - imms and mortals alike, for making CF kick so much butt.